Conference Agenda

When confronted with Uncertainty and crisis, higher education has historically turned to interdisciplinarity as a means of promoting innovation. This was the case in 1970 when OECD hosted the Interdisciplinarity. Problems of teaching and research in universities conference (Apostel, 1972). In current European higher education policy, interdisciplinarity is an integral part of the green transition, transnational higher education collaboration, and development of competences for an increasingly technologized labor market (Jæger, forthcoming). Many universities respond to such policies by encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration in research and education.

This paper will qualify the debate on interdisciplinarity in higher education by investigating a current case involving an interdisciplinarity project at a Danish PBL university. We ask: which general takeaways emerge from analyzing a current interdisciplinarity project initiated as a catalyst for higher education innovation and SSH/STEM-integration, from a social- and human science perspective?

The case project elements

Collaboration between STEM and SSH programs: As part of the 2022 to 2026 strategy to be a mission-oriented university, the university management encourages educational programs to increase collaboration across disciplinary and departmental boundaries, particularly in the form of collaboration across the SSH/STEM divide.

New skills in focus: The goal of the new interdisciplinarity project is to educate graduates with advanced collaboration skills, phrased as a “focus on holistic thinking”, “ability to work across disciplines” “affect and adapt to the development of society” and “enhance students’ ability to transcend their own disciplinary domain and engage in cross-boundary cooperation” (AAU Strategy 2022–2026).

Transdisciplinarity as the end goal: the university encourages collaboration projects that range from relatively limited interaction between disciplines and programs (but still ensuring that students become familiar with ‘foreign’ disciplines) to collaboration forms that require students to engage in joint problem-solving through integration of disciplinary perspectives and engagement of external partners. Later, cross-program get-to-know activities are likely to become mandatory. Study activities that require individual students to work in project groups composed of students from different disciplines will be arranged as elective modules.

Theoretical-Analytical approaches

Though interconnected, we distinguish between two dimensions of interdisciplinarity (Hultengren 1979) in our analysis:

A) The epistemological dimension relates to the processes of scientific work
The promotion of interdisciplinarity as an institution-wide innovation project may intentionally and unintentionally unsettle disciplinary self-conceptions and question established boundaries between research fields and programs. In order to investigate the implications of such disturbances, the proposed conceptual framework enables an analysis of differences between disciplines (with a particular focus on differences between SSH and STEM disciplines (Bernstein 1999; Abbott 2001)), different levels of interdisciplinarity (we propose a tripartite typology distinguishing between “borrowing” (Klein 2018), “trading zone interdisciplinarity” (Collins, Evans & Gorman 2019) and transdisciplinarity), and the translation of disciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary integration in teaching and learning (Jensen, Ravn & Stentoft 2019; Brassler 2020).

B) The educational-organizational dimension relates to the formation of certain competences in students

When we preliminarily turn to the existing practices of interdisciplinarity within the case university, we identify shared characteristics by several programs within the SSH faculty. This leads us to inquire into the historical background of these programs. Mostly forgotten today it turns out they share a period in the 1970s where a specific pedagogical tradition, the problem-oriented project pedagogy tradition (Hultengren 1976, Illeris 1974), was very influential. According to this tradition the project work of students is student-directed and problem-oriented, and problem-orientation “entails interdisciplinarity”, because it is the identified authentic problem - and not the traditions of the discipline – that is guiding the choice of theory and methods (Illeris 1981:15,99). The emphasis on interdisciplinarity within the tradition is inspired by the OECD 1970 conference and social critique (Hultengren, 1979).

Currently, the conformation of the European Higher Education Area is the central feature defining universities in Europe. Both methodological innovation and social dimension are two of the key elements within the new university model (Santos Rego et al., 2020). This calls for the adoption of a new formative paradigm centred on the student and the strengthening of the social function, as outlined in the Berlin Communiqué (2005). More recently, the Rome Communiqué (2020) proposes that institutions of higher education commit, along with their communities, to engaging in joint activities that are mutually beneficial and socially responsible.

Therefore, there is an interest in shaping spaces of convergence between these propositions, as pedagogical innovation can and should place students in contact with society. This positioning leads us to discuss University Social Responsibility, an approach promoting social commitment in all spheres and activities of the Academy. Among other things, this requires that teaching seeks the involvement of students with the community, aiming not only to enhance the meaningfulness of learning but also to contribute to the development of groups and communities near the campuses (Coelho and Menezes, 2021).

In this context, service-learning (SL) emerges as a useful methodology to strengthen connections between universities and society. It is defined as "a course-based, credit-bearing educational experience in which students (a) participate in an organized service activity that meets identified community needs and (b) reflect on the service activity in such a way as to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation of the discipline, and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility" (Bringle and Hatcher, 1995, p. 112). These experiences promote the university's engagement with the community and vice versa, ultimately leading to improve academic, social, and professional learning, as well as community growth.

In service-learning courses, the balance between universities and social entities or groups is crucial, moving away from positions in which communities are viewed as laboratories where students apply their knowledge (Baker-Boosamra, 2006). However, a significant portion of literature, especially in the European context, has focused on studying the effects of service-learning on student learning (Santos Rego et al., 2021), emphasizing the need to also consider the community in analyses of this methodology (Rodríguez-Izquierdo and Lorenzo, 2023).

Over the past two decades, various studies have confirmed the gains that the community obtains from such projects, with central focuses on knowledge exchange and satisfying the needs of entities and/or groups (Nduna, 2007; Schmidt and Robby, 2002; Van Rensburg et al., 2019). However, to strengthen the ties between the university and the community, with the goal of optimizing benefits for both parties, it is essential that the relationship is established on principles of genuine reciprocity.

Reciprocity is defined as the inclusion of principles such as respect, trust, genuine commitment, balance of power, shared resources, and clear communication between university institutions and community stakeholders (Jacoby, 2015). Using service-learning, the aim is to foster reciprocal relationships and mutual assistance between the university and social actors, exploring the impact on students as agents of social change (Asghar and Rowe, 2017; Martínez-Usarralde and Chiva-Bartoll, 2020).

Therefore, the objective of this study is to analyse whether the type of relationship established with the community in service-learning projects influences the development of transversal competencies in students.

This paper is framed in the Research Projects: “Service-Learning (SL) and employability of university graduates in Spain: competences for employment” (EDU2017-82629-R) and “The impact of the university in the community through service-learning projects. A study focused on reciprocity (SL)” (PID2021-122827OB-I00).